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Atlas of the Inner Seas [WIP]

Hey everybody, hows life? Like always, I had to drop off the cartographer's guild map, so to speak, this semester due to being preoccupied with trying to stay afloat in the real world. Art school's tough. But now that the semester's winding down Im ready to pick up where I left off last break.

Thats a little country I've been doing a lot of planning around. I suppose its the closest thing I have to a fleshed out campaign world. Eventually I want to run a role-play based on it, but thats probably still a ways off. In the meantime, Im interested in seeing how much fine detail I can work into the world. I'd really like to have a comprehensive background for the setting; it seems like a good challenge for myself to test my endurance as a world builder.

To start, I want to map an atlas of the country as well as the surrounding continent. I plan on approaching this methodically, so that I can maintain a consistency in the overall result. My goals are:

A fully rendered, large scale "world map" Regional political maps of all the major and minor nations in the area Informational maps showing climate, trade, political alliances, etc...

Over winter break I plan on working mainly on coastal contour vectors. That is, establishing all of the landmasses. Considering the scale Im planning on working on (1500 by 2000 mi) I doubt I'll get much further than that, but its a start.

So that's my plan for the next month. My mom's getting me my first tablet for Christmas, and hopefully this will give me a chance to get really proficient with it (speaking of which, does anyone have a suggestion for a good model tablet? Im supposed to let her know which I want, but I don't know much about them.)

Pics soon to come: I'll be updating with in-process shots of both my hand drawn drafts and the digitals once I start on them.

I couldnt be more happy and satisfied with my Wacom Bamboo tablet. It was affordable and the quality of it is top notch. Check out this video on enliighten.com . It discusses alot of different types of tablets and peripherals that may give you some more insight to make the best decision possible.

I look forward to seeing your upcoming project. good luck.

Our sense of the stability of the earth is an illusion due to the shortness of our lives.
- Neil deGrasse Tyson

So I got my tablet. Pretty much the best thing ever. With that in hand, Im ready to start cranking out this map. To give you guys a little perspective on how massive a mapping project im embarking on, heres the composite map of the full scale of the atlas:

That little grey blob is this map below. So yeah.
Anyways, for now my goal is to get the coastlines mapped in vector, like I said above. After that Ill flesh out the rest of the map, and eventually move into pulling in more information; ie political, climate, trade, etc.